SEO and multiple languages - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 64

And welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. What's up everybody? Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of the Unknown Secrets of SEO. It is great for you guys to join us today. We really appreciate you attending podcast number 64. I would say that I'm very sorry that these podcasts, as of late, have been showing up late. But you're not? No, because we're watching the World Cup. So, speaking of the World Cup, probably the biggest announcement, or whatever, you probably want to move a little closer. The biggest announcement ever, U.S. went through in what, like the last, in a minute of overtime. 91 minutes with four minutes of overtime. Unbelievable. That was phenomenal. So, what's up to Landon Donovan? In case you happen to be watching. Yeah. We appreciate your efforts. Dude. That's awesome. I didn't buy your jersey. Might. Oh, man. I was telling everyone, like, I do not get emotional about sports events at all. That was definitely worth it. That was just amazing. Absolutely amazing. As always, we like to talk about what we talked about last time. In fact, we're actually going to talk about a little bit of what we talked about last time. Because we didn't finish what we talked about last time. And that was the top ten mistakes that you can make in SEO. Okay. So, we're going to talk about that. That is what we talked about that last time. Number one, being a douche. Yeah, don't be a douche. That is typically your first mistake of being a douche with your website. Douchiness. Mistake number one. Douchiness. Really should be cleaned up. That's kind of weird. Yeah. All right. So, I have a note here about a video. I don't even know what that means. So, we'll go on to the next piece of news. Piece of news. Chrome actually incorporates Flash now. How cool is that? I didn't know that. Well, there was always a Flash component that you could down. Chrome put Flash in the browser. So, I'm sure it's got some sort

of methodology for updating it regularly, et cetera, et cetera. That is what's up. That is. You know, continuing on your, in particular, Yahoo rant, Larry Cornett, an exec with Yahoo. Left. Left, yeah. So, who works there now? Like, John and Bill. That's pretty much it. Yeah, and Bill sends out the bills. John, John drinks a lot. Yeah. Another point, Nintendo at the E3, which is Electronics 3 Expo or something, I guess, Nintendo 3DS stole the show. They just, like, apparently was the most. They have a new system coming out? Yeah, it's the little, the DS ones. Oh, the flip-up? Yeah, exactly. And all I can say is, well, they probably didn't see my phone there. Ah. Because I have the Sprint Evo, and it rocks. You know, Maya, this over the past weekend, I was visiting some family, my aunt goes, you know, there's an adult Nintendo NES coming out. And I was like, for real? Because I'm thinking, you know, adult, adult. And she was like, no, fool, it's like for adults. Like, I'm thinking adult content. Yeah, yeah. And so I'm like, are you serious? Is it preloaded? How much does this cost? Is there a monthly fee involved? Because there's a lot of stuff out there for free. I mean, this is awesome. She's like, no, it actually has games designed for people. So what is the etiquette on a plane when the guy next to you is watching something and all you hear is, bon-cha-cha-cha-cha. Like, uh. Do you have an extra headphone jack? Dude, I can't see. Turn your screen my way. Come on. That girl looks kind of like that girl over there. Hey, is this you? So, if anybody's listening or watching, there is no adult content NES. That was my mistake. There should be, though. We're here to say that there should be. This is pretty interesting. There is a dude right now. Go to DavidOnDemand.com. The dude will do anything that you tweet him to do. It has to be legal. That's the only caveat. And

he will do anything that you tweet him to do. This was apparently some arrangement he has with his boss. He's in the press. And he wanted to go to cons for some festival. It wasn't the film festival. And the boss was like, you know what? You can go. But you have to agree to do everything they tweet and tell you to do. For how long? The week that he's there or something. Oh, wow. So, I pulled it out. There was a beautiful shot. Of course, he turns it off while he's sleeping and in the shower. But there was a beautiful shot of the beach. I mean, just gorgeous. And I was thinking, dude, clean the window. That's cool. I'm going to check that out. And that's David on Demand. Now, when we started this podcast, we had no idea that we were going to have listeners. Other than each other. And we certainly didn't. And we don't listen. Not really. And we certainly didn't think that we'd have a listener and watcher who would be so participatory. Who would actually create an icon for, I mean, a logo for our podcast. Oh, that's sweet. Who would actually create a video. Like a commercial video for our podcast. Yeah, like. Like. That was awesome. Really. Darren Bowie, that is amazing. We really appreciate you. And we really appreciate what you've done. You know, for those of you who listen regularly, we interact with Darren on a regular basis. I think it's just because apparently, remember he asked a question about two weeks ago that we never, haven't got around to ask and answer yet? I got it here. Don't worry. Maybe he's just trying to push us to get the answers. Anyway, the video, you can find it. By the way, you can find us and stalk us and all that. First, you can find the video on facebook.com slash eWebStyle. And then you'll see it in the videos. It's one of the most recent entries right now. And what is the name of that software

he used? Because I'd never heard of it until Darren. It's prezi.com. P-R-E-Z-I dot com. And Darren does another really amazing video using that software. You can find that one at twitter.com slash saveusgoogle. And you can find a link to that video. And it's really an amazing two-minute video. He said he put together in about 45 minutes. Okay. And it's awesome. Yeah, I do remember that. So when we do any presentations, we will probably be using that Prezi software. And I think kind of I asked him, you know, how long did it take and all that. And that's when he put together the video for us. Thank you, Darren. You can find Darren at DarrenBui.eu. D-A-R-R-E-N-B-O-O-Y dot EU. I didn't want to get that wrong. And apparently he was listening to our last podcast and he wanted to clear up a little misconceptions that there may have been. First it says, I am from Welsh. I think he means I am Welsh. From Wales. Which is? Part of the UK. Okay. I grew up in, on Oxfordshire, England, which is. Which is? England. In England-ish area. Okay. And he now lives in Endoven, Netherlands. So he's a pretty international guy by American standards. Man, that's, yeah, that's what's up, man. Too bad y'all are, they didn't make it. I don't think they made it. Sorry about that, Darren. Well, still England. Okay. Wales didn't, England he could be cheering for maybe. I don't know, probably. Okay, so he was wondering if we could address the question we had before. And he asked about having too many keywords but in different languages. How would Google rank this? He has about five keywords for the page in English, but the same in French, German, and Dutch. How would Google rank this? Now, actually, the first time I read this, I thought the answer was kind of obvious. Because, you know, you should have a page, and we talked about this, you should have a page, you know, well, in general, if you're in, we said specifically, if you're

in France and you're marketing to French, you should, to French people, you should definitely have your website in French, right? That's just a no-brainer. Because the French people you're marketing to will search in French most probably. Not only that, even if your web page came up and it's in English and that's not what they want, they're just going to bounce. Yeah. So, it's not just about the fact of them finding them. That's one. We always talk about CIVO, search engine visitor optimization. Step two is, okay, now that they come to your website, what are they going to do? But this is a little more interesting. It's talking about, okay, I've got a good page. It's optimized in English. I can put the words in French, German, and Dutch on it also. Interesting, interesting angle. And the total, complete, unadulterated answer is, it only depends on your competition. I'd say that. Right? I'd agree with that. I would also say, and this is all, this is just an educated guess from what I know about the Google bot. The Google bot is intelligent enough to understand when you're just throwing words in there. I would probably say, I would probably recommend against throwing in a French word, a French keyword on an English page. Because I know that a Google bot will check in English. Because we typically, I typically read English, because that's all I can read. If you put an English. It was marginal. Yeah, really. I was like, I speak three-fourths of a language. If you put a, you know, blue one-armed widget in a sentence, the bot is going to check. If it's going to check a couple words before that keyword and a couple words after to make sure that it makes sense. So, if you just throw a French keyword into an English text, it's probably going to do the same thing. Check a couple words before and check a couple words after. It might make sense. You just put, not to say, you might run it. It might not.

And so, you, that might be a challenge. And so, I would look out for something like that. And also, from our experience, we see some situations where, at least regionalizing. So, there's a lot of suburbs around Houston. And so, of course, our clients in and around Houston are interested in tapping into the markets in those suburbs. And so, we can, in some cases, just throw the name of the suburb in at the bottom of the page and get some reasonable page range. So, again, I think it really boils down to competition. If nobody has, you know, again, if you're selling blue one-armed widgets and there is no French language page for blue one-armed widgets, and you put the word, blue words, blue one-armed widgets on your English page in French, you've got a pretty good opportunity to actually show up on the first position. I'd say so. Yeah, if no one else is optimizing, you could do pretty, I'd say probably much whatever you want. And as soon as somebody makes an all-French page, I think Google's going to rank. Google, from a contextual basis, is going to give a lot more value to what they're doing than what you're doing. So, yes, you may have mentioned it. And, again, let's go back to the experience. Because just because you get them to your page, you know, I try not to assume that everyone speaks English. If they get to your page because you do have the word in French or Dutch and all you have is English on the page, then are you really doing that yourself that much? I personally would bounce. If I went to a page that was in French and I see one English term, which was the term that I'm looking for, I'd probably bounce. Well, mainly because I don't speak that language. Yeah, I mean, that's probably what's going to happen. So, in general, it's all about competition. Yes, it could be valuable. And at the end of the day, we really think that you shouldn't mess with

that. He also asked, have we checked out WordPress 3.0? It looks really good from a search engine optimization navigation standpoint. We haven't checked it out. Yeah, I definitely have not. But I did read that when I showed you the top CMS things, the top rankings of CMS at WordPress was like top five, I believe, in terms of SEO. And WordPress didn't used to be considered CMS. It was considered a blog software. Blog software, right. So, they're really upping their game and I think you can even get shopping cart modules and stuff for WordPress now. So, if you're looking for a great CMS, then we and Darren co-signed it. WordPress is a good CMS. Yeah, we definitely, we use, so we use Joomla as a CMS and we use WordPress typically for our blog. So, we're kind of a, if you will, a Joomla WordPress house and I would be happy to use either one of those for, you know, for those purposes. So, again, thank you very much, Darren Bowie. And, again, you know, one of the things, what has he done? He's done a number of things. He's gone to iTunes. He's created an account and he's submitted a review about us. And he built a logo and a presentation. He built a logo and a presentation. You don't have to do all of those. You can choose any two and do any two of those for us. So, if you can skip the iTunes review, you can do a video and a logo for us. We really appreciate that. You can find us on Twitter, twitter.com slash eWebStyle. I already gave out our Facebook page. I'll do it again, facebook.com slash eWebStyle. We usually broadcast this podcast live on Fridays at 9.15 Central Standard Time. And you can find that on Ustream. The easiest way to get to that page is eWebStyle.com slash U, the letter, stream. And that will automatically forward you to the Ustream page that is ours. You can also send us an email at podcast at e-webStyle.com. All right.

So, we've answered listener letters. Top ten mistakes. Let's get back to the top ten mistakes. Yeah. Let's jump right in. I think we covered about five, maybe six of those last time. Six out of ten we covered. Yep. Okay. What was the first? Targeting the wrong keywords. Well, let's mention the first one because it is so important. Yeah. Keywords, keywords, keywords. Targeting the wrong keywords. Target the right keywords. Yeah. The target the right keywords. Yes. Make sure. Don't just pick keywords. Make sure you do your research about the keyword before you pick it. By the way, I wanted to mention this. This is very interesting. So, you go into Google. You can type keyword selector tool. And I noticed this week that I copied and pasted one of our clients who, by the way, the client for their 30 keywords, all but two are on the first page. Oh, that's what's up. It only took us two months to make that happen. Three months. Probably three months to make that happen. And the other two are looming, if you will. So, I copied all the keywords, all 30 keywords. I pasted it in the Google keyword tool and I got these results. And Google augments, you know, it says, oh, you might also want to consider this term, that term, that term, whatever. In this case, it's the Orthopedic Surgery Center. One of the terms that they gave us, which was pretty good because it had high search volume and we hadn't caught it before, was sports injury doctor. Okay. So, then in another browser where I'm actually signed into my AdWords account, I copy those same 30 keywords, paste it in, hit submit, I got different results. So, the implication is I got different results either because of browser, probably not, or because in one case I was signed in and in one I wasn't. By the way, in the one where I was signed in, sports injury doctor, which is a high value term in terms of number of searches, was not in

the list. So, even when you're doing keyword research, don't quit with one tool. Yeah. We tend to use multiple tools, multiple angles, you know, whatever it takes. We'll talk to our friends, family. Hey, how would you search for this? And you get bizarre answers that are actually very relevant. And the ones... People are weird. People search in different ways. Totally different ways. Yeah. All right. So, we wanted to mention that. Again, let's move on to number seven. So, this is mistake number seven that people make in terms of SEO on their webpages. Using only images for headers. People do that? Only images for headers. I was like, because I'm thinking, that's a problem. I'm stuck. I didn't want to say that, but I'm like, okay, I just put it out there. I didn't know. Images. What's wrong with images? Google doesn't read them. Right. So, if your image is your header, and it says something... Okay. So, I got you now. So, yeah. If you're going to use your image as a header, how about you put a tag on that image? At least. Yeah. How about you also include a text? How about, in fact, you figure out how to use CMS in a way so that you don't have to use an image so that you can actually end up creating a text, something that Google can read. Okay. Because, again, Google... Who was it? I saw Matt Cutts talking the other day saying, they thought about going through and parsing and doing OCR, optical character recognition, on all images, and then kind of tagging those so that they know what the text in the image is. And they said, you know what? I'm not going to do that. Okay. I was like, for real? They thought about it. I mean, it's something that they entertain. And they're like, you know what? If you're not using good web design standards, then you're not going to do well on our search engines. Okay. Now, why do they... This is one of the things, because

this is... We all have this feeling that Google's manipulating us and causing us to do things and jump through hoops. In reality, Google's purpose is to provide a good user experience to the Google user. So imagine this is a conundrum. Imagine that you've got the website that is the preeminent website with the most valuable information on blue one-armed widgets, and everything is in pictures, right? Google actually would like to show that. It's not that they don't want to show the website with pictures. It's just too hard for their robots to parse. But they actually would like to show that, because that's the webpage that Google can show its Google user that is the most valuable site. So it's interesting. So Google, you know, it's not just that Google has all these rules and wants us to jump through hoops. It's just that Google's trying to provide a great experience to the Google user, and in doing so, they, you know, if we want to kind of conform to that and actually succeed in that environment, then we actually have to do the same thing. Okay. I mean, pretty much, Google sets the standard. So if they say this is what you need to do... We do it. It's a good idea to follow that. Yeah. That's true. So at the end of the day, we're just jumping through hoops. So that's a big mistake. And really, you should be using H1 tags and H2 tags. And you can modify them. Oh, that kind of header. Man, I'm lost. Okay. Why did you say header? All right. So you... I'm thinking like the banner that everyone always has at the top of their website. Oh, yeah. And I hear it called a header, a banner, a this, a that. Okay. Okay. Makes sense. And it often is comprised of images for aesthetic reasons. I didn't know it was header tags. Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. Well, that also... But even the one across the top, if you've got text in there, you want to really seriously

consider having it as actual text and not text in an image. Okay. The number eight is ignoring URLs. Like, I mean... Is this two in a row that you don't know? Really? Is that a problem? I know them all the time. I try not to look at it. The first thing that comes to mind is ignoring your URL, especially if you're working with a CMS. Boom. You get these super long URLs that like... It's like XXYZ dash equals ID 1024. And that makes... To me, that makes no sense. Because I'm the kind of person that I will like... I will take a URL like bluearmwidgets.com forward slash products forward slash 2009 forward slash fall season. And I will cut off the last three directories and go with... Go to the homepage. Yeah. And I'll try to do... So I'll navigate pages like that. And that makes it difficult if you have just a string of characters and numbers and you can't figure out what goes in what folder. Right. Well, and one of the points that they're making is, look, if it's a lot of content management systems will display particular pages based on, say, article number or content, you know, whatever they want to call it, webpage number, index number. And that can be a challenge, right? So all things being equal, you've got something that's in a CMS system that is all numeric, you know, article number 65493. And the other one says article number blue one-armedwidgets. All right. Well, blue one-armedwidgets is actually in the URL. And if that's what you're searching for, they are going to have an advantage. So you can place well without the keywords in the domain name, without them in the domain and without them in the URL. You have an advantage, actually, two-step advantage. One, if they are in the URL. And two, if they're in the domain name. So, yeah, you do not want to ignore your URLs. And that's actually one of the comments that Darren Bowie was just making is that it looks

like WordPress is doing an even better job. They've always been pretty good. An even better job, actually, when you turn on certain features, they've always been pretty good. And now they're doing an even better job with SEO URLs, URLs for SEO. Okay. So create SEO-friendly URLs. And don't be a douche. And stuff a keyword in your URL. If it's not, it doesn't pertain to it. I see that all the time. Don't do that. Yeah. Don't be a douche. Yeah, seriously. Oh, I forgot to mention, right? We talk about Sevo. We are the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. We are also known as the Red Bull of SEO podcasts. Why? Why are we known as the Red Bull of SEO podcasts? Because if you go on iTunes and you look at our reviews, one of the guys says, yours is the only SEO podcast I can listen to on my drive to work and not fear I'm going to fall asleep. Wow. That sounds like Red Bull. Red Bull. Red Bull. Yeah. We're giving you wings. We are the Red Bull of SEO podcasts. So don't you forget it. Number nine mistake is called backlink spamming. Backlink spamming. Okay, so throwing a bunch of links on a page, like link farming kind of? That's what comes to mind. Well, it's kind of like posting on, you know, we talk about this regularly. If you want to post, do post on blogs. Yes. Do post, I'm saying do, not do not, do post on forums. Use the links to your advantage so they come back to you. And don't be a douche when you post. Yeah. There should be some eesh word in that rhyme there. Yeah, and post on an SEO company's website, hey, looked at your site. It looks great. I wonder if you talk about doing SEO. Check out my site. And, like, duh. That's a douche. Come on. That's a douche with a capital D. Yeah, really. Like, don't do that kind of stuff. And I love to read forums and community

blogs and stuff because that's how I learn new tips and tricks. Penthouse forums. Hey, I learn new tips and tricks. It's all about learning, you know. That was good. So, and I'll follow those links. But it's obvious when someone is just trying to get that backlink left. So, don't do that. Yeah. And there's ways to do it. Do it right. And, again, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is you're providing a good experience to the Google user. Yeah. Which is really a good experience to any user on the web. And if you're being a douche, then you're not providing a good user. Yeah. There should be some sort of internet police to. And then remember, like, where you get your backlinks from, it can have an effect on your site. On your site. Yeah. If you're getting backlinks from crazy sites or sites with a bad reputation, you know, you typically don't want those. So, be careful where you put your links. And remember, backlinks are good. However, you know, it's better that I would rather have five backlinks from a website with a page rank of 10 than 1,000 crappy zero page rank links. Yep. I mean, it's just going to be more valuable. So, be very careful about who, how, and when you link. Yep. I don't know if you noticed, Darren, I'm actually now drinking Cherry Zero, Coca-Cola Cherry Zero. I didn't have to say you were drinking Diet Coke. It's not just Diet Coke. I don't know if I've upgraded. It tastes pretty good, actually. I don't know if I've upgraded. We really shouldn't do that unless we're getting paid. Yeah, really. We're not. Scratch that. I'm not drinking Cherry Zero until Coke pays me. And what do we have? Number 10, lack of keywords in the content. Do I even have to comment on this one? So, like, we say two things. Content is king. Keywords, keywords, keywords. Now, we really have two kind of things that we're putting in place now. Context is important

in content. Yes. And actually, it would be keyword context is important in content. Oh, that's hard to say. I don't even know what that means. Is that like a header? Yeah, that's a long phrase. I don't even know what that means. Keyword context is important in content. So, you can't just throw in keywords randomly, right? The context, the sentence needs to make sense. The logical flow of the paragraph needs to make sense. So, the contextual nature, not nature, the context of using the keywords in the content is important. Yeah. And you want to make sure you do that. And what this is saying, actually, is just make sure you have the keywords. That's step one. Step two is make sure that you're using those keywords in the appropriate manner. And you're not keyword stuffing. Yeah. You know, ask, read it yourself. Actually, I would say read it yourself. But you're going to be biased because you probably read your content a lot. Ask your buddies. Ask your mom. Hey, read this. Does it make sense? What does this make you want to do? Does it make you want to leave? Would you stay here? Would you watch this? Ask, you know, people in your office. Get different people's opinions on it. But, you know, if the majority is that, hey, it's, you know, if your context is not right or you're stuffing or you're doing something, people, they're not going to want to stay. They're not going to want to visit. So, watch out for that kind of stuff. Content is king. Keywords, keywords, keywords. Now, here's something I can kind of back. I did a couple analysis, those things, and people had, and it was two in a row that I got, and people had phenomenal content. They had just pages and pages of content. But one thing I noticed is that he was getting articles, tons of articles, great articles that were related to what he did. However, the content, like it wasn't, how can I explain this correctly? One, it was on

his homepage. He had a lot of articles on his homepage, and you want to stay away from that because, I said, your homepage is your prime real estate. Rather than just stuffing it with random content and even articles that are somewhat related, you want to explain your business on your homepage. And that happened to two people that asked me for an analysis. It was just random because they're about two or three days apart. And both had lots of articles, great content, but was lacking in keywords. And it was also, it was not about their business. Their homepage content should be, you're selling your company. It's about what you do. So, they weren't executing proper SEVO. There you go. Right? Search engine visitor optimization. It was a great article. I definitely would have read the article. I enjoyed the information I got from the article, or from the articles. But, when I was on their homepage, I actually forgot what... Why you were there. Yeah, because I'm reading all these articles, and I was like, wait a minute. So, lack of call to action is one. Just lack of awareness of what you want the user to see when they come to your website. So, again, search engine visitor optimization, SEVO, S-E-V-O, is really important. So, getting people to your website with those great articles is nice. Now, once they're there, you've got to be able to, frankly, you've got to be able to manipulate the user into, you know, taking the next step, or getting a white paper, or submitting an email, or whatever it may be, so that you can change that experience from just kind of a passive one to an interactive one. So, get them to pick up the phone, or, you know, something. You've got to have those calls to action. There you go, and that's a perfect example of having lots of content, but I don't even know if that was, I can't say it was not contextually right. That's what I was trying to go, but I don't think

that's even right. I had lots of content, but it just wasn't partitioned or placed, it wasn't well placed. It didn't have a plan, right? Like a plan of attack for that website. Okay, I'm getting here because of this. What am I doing with them once they are here? Yeah, once they're there. And you guys are here. We appreciate that you are here. In fact, because you're here, we are the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. We appreciate you listening. This is actually the end of our podcast, which is the end of podcast 64. I think it's 64. Yes, it's the end of podcast 64. We really appreciate you guys listening. Again, make sure if you get any good value out of this, just do us a small little favor. You know, add us to your blog. Mention us here. There are so many ways to find us and connect with us. On Facebook, you can find us. Facebook.com slash eWebStyle. Twitter.com slash eWebStyle. eWebStyle.com slash eustream. And YouTube.com slash eWebStyle. That's another one. So you can find us, follow us, email us. It's podcast at e-webStyle.com. Call us, 713-592-6724. And keep your questions coming. If you run into a particular situation that you're not comfortable with, you're not familiar with, or you just want a second opinion, send it on over. We'll be glad to help out. We really appreciate you guys. We really appreciate you listening and watching whoever's out there. Darren, England's going down. And anyone that's listening in Ghana, you can stop. Just stop listening. Man, it took us so long. That's all right. We still got Botswana. Both of you. Both of you in Africa that are listening. One of you stop. The other one keep listening. Ghana's going down. All right. Thank you guys for listening. This is the end of Podcast 64. You're listening to The Unknown Secrets of SEO. My name is Chris Burrage. I'm Paul Henson. Bye-bye for now. I'm Brown House.